The Misadventures of Benny the Loser Overunit
by Rhianwen
Summary: The BioDread Empire had never been good at producing highly skilled men and women. However, until one special idiot came along, they had no idea how bad it could get. Unashamedly goofy. Now with massive rewrites.


The Misadventures of Benny the Loser Overunit

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Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters depicted in this story. Except for Benny, and I don't own him entirely, either. He is the joint creation of my fiance, Bezo, and I. It's kinda like...joint custody. But he has, indeed, approved Benny's use here. If anyone else wants to borrow him, go quickly to bed. I'm sure a good night's sleep will help you get over it. :)

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In the beginning there were Overunits.

Well, this is not, strictly speaking, true. In the beginning, there was the Word, and soon after came the subculture with the very brief and succinct title of Rap, to take for its catchphrase this Word, Word. Sadly, Rap was not terribly popular during the infancy of the history of the universe, and quickly went under, usurped in most places by Blues, Folk, Soft Rock, Adult Alternative, and during the Darkest of Dark Ages, Boy-Band/Diva Pop. Not until well into its adolescence did humanity make up its mind to Try Again, and, not until it did, did Rap truly carve out a niche for itself.

Years later, after Rap's niche had grown into a veritable smoking crater, filled with thumping bass, droopy trousers popularly worn around the ankles, and some of the most creative lyrics ever comprised completely of three, perhaps four, different words, would come the Overunits.

Of course, this implies, rather deceptively, that Rap in some way led to Overunits. This could not be farther from the truth, as neither the man who would later take unto himself these men and women with (almost) as little sense of humour as he, nor the man who would meet an explosive conclusion attempting to stop him particularly liked rap; indeed, the latter of the two men had lived in the constant fear, ever since his son's thirteenth birthday, that it was only a matter of time before he would hear the teeth-rattling thump-thump-thump drifting from the boy's bedroom. Instead, naturally, of the thump-thump-thump of the boy beating up his toy robots.

The boy had never liked robots, any more than his father had liked rap.

It was these two men, who would eventually, through a series of events fit for a made-for-television feature-length movie cobbled together from clips of a short-lived television series, lead to the existence of Overunits, as the compound term is used here, at all.

Perhaps, then, we might say that, at some far-advanced point in the history of humanity, there were Overunits.

And Benny was their King.

Or so he liked to believe.

The reality of the situation was quite different, as it often is.

Benny was, indeed, the only Overunit to see himself in this high and valuable position; the rest of the Overunits, had they had any concept of "humour", would have compared him to a rather different facet of court life: that of the court jester. But not a good court jester, by any means, trained from childhood in the art of high-brow wit, timing, and a sense of absurdity; rather, the half-witted bungler that was dragged off the street as a last resort to make a grumpy king laugh at the misfortunes of others when he beheld such a pitiful specimen of humanity.

It has been commonly speculated that it was just this thinking that led to Benny's promotion from Paperweight to Overunit within the Bio-Dread Empire at all, although this theory has always been carefully kept from Lord Dread himself, lest he order all theorizers immediately digitized while glancing nervously over his shoulder to make certain that Overmind has not overheard and picked out the substantial grain of truth with its keen Big Ball of Pretty-Coloured Vapour intelligence.

To this sort of supernaturally fortunate, beamingly cheerful, and utterly useless (if constantly entertaining) individual that Benny was – and remains, as far as anyone knows or cares to – is often affixed, completely and overwhelmingly against their will, another sort of individual: the competent, hard-working, and generally rather grim sort that finds themselves placed, again and again, alongside the Benny sort through what sick twist of fate they know not.

Although there had been far more grisly, far more painful, and far more overall dramatic reasons for her random running-screaming-into-the-night from the Land of the Overunits, at the time these reasons had seemed hardly more compelling to a certain Former Youth Leader Chase than a very friendly and chattery Benny ready at all times to increase exponentially the amount of stress in her life with the sheer effort it took to reverse the effects of his general personality enough to keep both out of severe trouble. Surely, a new life – any new life – would not only rest a little easier on a conscience that managed by sheer stubbornness to survive through years of work to eradicate it towards the betterment of a lot of glorified blenders and such, but would also hold the decided benefit of placing her far away from Benny the Loser.

With a little bit of luck, she would never have to see him again.

And for a long while, the young woman's fourth-dearest wish came true.

But it was, and remains, a universal truth that such luck would not – could not – last forever.

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"Weird," Scout muttered, scanning the previously cloudless heavens as they turned abruptly sulky grey and a clap of thunder echoed through the eerily silent area in nearly perfect time with a flash of lightning. "Ah, well. Let's get back to…hey, what are we here to do, again?"

But what they were, in fact, there to do would remain un-pondered by both, as the infinitely unfortunate timing of the fabled Loser was about to take swift and terrifying hold.

"Bwah-hah-hah!" the lone figure laughed triumphantly as he bounded across the barren wasteland that is the future from which bunnies, kitties, puppies, and other cute, fwuffy wittle aminals had long since been eradicated, toward Scout and Pilot. "I've got you now!"

"One guy?" Scout laughed easily. "One guy's gonna take down both of us? If I weren't considering the source, I'd be offended. One guy!"

"Uh...Scout?" Pilot began, nudging him urgently and indicating that he turn around. "Guess again."

"Oh," Scout said simply, taking in the sight of a few dozen Bio-Mechs trundling toward them.

"Guys!" unidentified man now behind them whined. "I wanted to take care of them by myself!"

"It was the order of Lord Dread that we come to assist you, Loser Overunit who is called Benny," one of the Bio-Mechs barked.

"Benny? The Loser?" Pilot repeated, looking decidedly sick, even through a helmet. "Oh, God, it couldn't be. Fate isn't that cruel."

Scout frowned, which was not at all visible through his helmet.

"What are you talking about?"

Meanwhile, the Bio-Mech was continuing.

"Lord Dread has calculated to five decimal points the exact probability of your doing...anything without disaster occurring, and found it the logical conclusion to keep several of us ready and waiting on the small chance that Power sent any of his men here."

"Well, he only sent one; she's not a men," Benny giggled, gesturing toward Pilot, who was at that moment coming to the realization that Fate could indeed be that cruel, and praying that she might drop neatly off the face of the planet before Benny could recognize her, and the situation could descend into the silliness for which Rhianwen is so very infamous.

"Rhianwen?" Scout repeated, scratching his head.

"I've never heard of her either," Pilot admitted.

Scout snickered.

"Sounds like either a brand of whiskey, or character in a really bad amateur fantasy novel."

"You're only half right," a voice declared snippily from the heavens. "It's the name of a really bad fanauthor, who accidentally put whiskey on her ice cream once because it was dark, and she thought it was Butterscotch Schnapps."

"Uh...huh," Scout said, eyes shifting nervously. "That was weird."

"You only have yourself to blame, Scout," Pilot reminded him mildly. "You're the one who started interacting with the narration."

"Hey, how was I supposed to know the author would get involved?"

"Guys!" Benny interjected, the voice of reason for the first and last time ever. "You're breaking the fourth wall!"

"Speaking of breaking things," Lord Dread's voice boomed over Benny's little intercom thingie, "get out of there, Loser Overunit who is called Benny, before you start breaking things!"

"Aw, boss..." Benny whined.

"No arguments! Out of there! Now!"

"Fine," Benny began to grumble, but never quite managed, freezing in horror mid-grumb. "There's something in my hair," he whispered, eyes wide and terrified."

"Man, it's only a spider," Scout called consolingly, fully aware even as he did so of the ridiculousness of comforting one of Dread's men.

"A spider!" Benny shrieked. "Get it out! Get it out! Get it out! Get it out! Get it out!"

"This might be a bad time to mention," Pilot said solemnly as the young man went careening past, "that Benny's deathly afraid of spiders."

"Oh," Scout nodded. There really was little else to be said.

"GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!"

At this point, a strange thing began to happen: an odd sort of fluke kicked in. In his mad careening, Benny effortlessly knocked a Bio-Mech to the ground, effectively creating a pile of scrap metal. Then another Bio-Mech joined the first. And another. And another.

"So," Scout began slowly, having thought of something else that really needed saying as he watched in consternation the other young man darting in crazy patterns all over the barren wasteland that is the future, littered with little pieces of a few dozen unfortunate Bio-Mechs that, it seemed, would not survive until a battle scene, "you know him?"

Pilot began to reply, but was cut off as another howl, this time of,

"THEY'RE LAYING EGGS! I JUST KNOW IT! MY HEAD HAS BECOME A BREEDING-GROUND FOR MUTANT SPIDERS!" drifted toward them.

"Uh, yeah," she admitted reluctantly, wincing sympathetically as a loud thunk testified to the spider crawling through the young man's hair being enough of a distraction to lead him directly into a wall of rock. "That's Benny."

"Benny," Scout repeated, looking warily at the unconscious form sprawled out over the ground.

"Yeah."

"Hey, old pal or not, he's still an Overunit-"

"-however that happened," Pilot murmured to herself.

"-and now he's unconscious. So let's get out of here before he wakes up."

"Uh...I really doubt Benny could hurt us. Unless it was by some crazy Benny-fluke. Doing things properly was never his strong point," Pilot said, looking down at Benny with an odd combination of nostalgic fondness and pained nausea.

"So, you think we should help him?" Scout frowned doubtfully.

Pilot hastily backed away.

"I didn't say that."

The young man – the one of the two in this scene that is still conscious, that is – blinked.

"You are going to tell me this story later, aren't you?"

A noise suspiciously like a pained whimper drifted back toward him. He chuckled.

"Yeah, I definitely want to hear this one."

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"So," Scout began several hours later, hours which had been filled by grand adventure and glorious victory snatched at the last second from the yawning jaws of defeat – hours which have been unobtrusively removed due to budget cuts and lack of author-imagination. "This Benny-story. Considering a guy who did our work for us by running into a wall and knocking himself out managed to become an Overunit, it sounds like it'll be interesting.

"Too interesting," Pilot muttered.

Scout's eyebrow lifted slightly.

"Huh?"

"Well, let's put it this way," she replied. "A friendship with Benny, wanted or unwanted, is the single most dangerous and gruelling experience you will ever try to avoid."

He stared at her in an incredulous silence, and then gave in to a gale of laughter.

"Fine," she shrugged. "Laugh. I'm glad someone can get amusement out of this.

"Sorry," Scout grinned. "You just looked so serious. 'It is the greatest force of destruction and evil the world has ever known.'"

"Benny's got to be up there. Destruction, anyway."

"Oh, come on! What damage could an idiot like that do?"

"What's going on?" Hawk asked, shooting Tank a bemused look as the two passed.

"Oh, she's just telling me about her old pal – "

"That's a stretch," Pilot interjected.

" – Benny."

"The guy you told us about earlier?" Hawk frowned, back-pedalling.

"Yeah; the one who put himself out by running into a rock," Scout confirmed.

"Sounds like a special guy," Hawk commented with a shake of his head.

"That's Benny," Pilot shrugged.

"Not much of a walking force of destruction, from what I can tell," Scout chuckled.

She turned to him.

"Do you want to hear about the first time I met Benny?"

"Sure. Tell away."

"Okay. I think I was about eight, which would have made Benny eleven."

"Oh, so he wasn't in your classes," Hawk said.

"Well, that's not true. Benny was never what you'd call 'advanced'. Anyway, he came into the room, smiled widely at everyone, got a crack across the back of the head from the man teaching the class for such a display, and promptly tripped over his shoe-lace – no small feat for a boy wearing loafers – and fell onto the overhead projector."

"So, he broke an overhead projector," Scout shrugged. "Accidents happen."

"That's not all. While he was falling, he flailed at least enough to send his shoe out the door."

"And…?"

"Right into a woman carrying a box of test tubes."

Scout nodded slowly.

"Oh. That's – "

"Full of a synthesized virus."

" – not so good," he finished.

"The man teaching the class was furious, because it meant we couldn't have the class in that room. Or the rest of the rooms in that corridor. And that clouded his judgement to send Benny for a clean-up crew."

"Oh, good God," Hawk chuckled.

"And I don't know why, but he had at least enough of a grudge against me to send me with Benny after he protested that he was new, and he'd get lost alone. What no one realized was that this wasn't going to change over the next ten years he spent there."

"But they would," Scout added dramatically. "They would."

Hawk laughed, and then immediately stopped at the sight of Pilot's aggrieved expression.

"I'm glad you guys find it funny," she said, rather miffed. "It sure wasn't finny to an eight-year old girl hauled in front of Dread because the new boy that she was with had managed to effectively shut down almost half of Volcania."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Breaking a bunch of test-tubes shut down half of Volcania?" Scout laughed incredulously.

"No," Pilot replied flatly.

"I was afraid of that…"

"Do you know what happens to a generator when you spill orange soda on it?"

"Uh…"

"Well, I do now. But don't ask me where Benny got the soda, or why there was so damn much in the can. To this day, it's one of the greatest mysteries of my life."

"You need some new mysteries of the universe," Scout said seriously. "So, Benny spilled his soda on the main generator. Can I ask why you two were near it to find a clean-up crew?"

"It was Benny's idea," Pilot replied defensively. "If you'd had to listen to Benny's chatter for half an hour, you'd be to the point that everything looked like a good idea, too. I can't even remember if I was really that stupefied, or if I was consciously trying to bring about my own death."

"At eight?" Hawk chuckled. "Bad sign."

"So, is there more?" Scout asked, shaking his head sadly.

"More?" she echoed. "That's just the beginning. I haven't even gotten to noon of my first day with Benny."

"Then, by all means, continue," Hawk invited amiably as he wandered past again. "After this day, I'm anxious for a story about someone with worse luck."

"Yeah; how did you two not get killed by a crazily sparking generator?" Scout asked.

"Well, this is where my first introduction to the concept of a 'Benny-fluke' came in. I don't really know. Everything just went red, and when it cleared, Benny was dragging me away by the arm, trying to hide from the Overunits. But since he was trying to hide, of course he had to fail, and they found us easily."

Here she broke off and snickered slightly under two startled gazes.

"So, do you want to know what happened when Dread demanded to know why half of Volcania had spontaneously shut down?"

"You bet," Scout said emphatically. "I've got to hear what Dread thought of this Benny kid."

"Not much," Pilot said thoughtfully. "But not as little as Overmind."

"Oh, boy. Why?" Scout asked.

"Well, poor frightened little Benny was backing up while Dread was screaming at him. Naturally, the iron stand that Overmind rests on was right behind him…

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Li'l Jennifer watched, stunned and completely immobilized with horror – and perhaps a wee bit of childlike mischief that hadn't yet been eradicated from her young mind as bunnies had already been from the planet by this time – as Li'l Benny continued to back up.

"I-I don't know why you're yelling at us," the little boy began in a quavery voice. "Accidents happen to everyone, right?"

"Accidents, perhaps," Overunit Webber, who was still poking about, doubtless anxious to see both of these destructive children receive the severest possible punishment, "but not three full-out disasters in one morning."

"Accidents are not of the machine!" Lord Dread bellowed.

Benny straightened up and fixed his hair, which had been mussed by the breeze produced by one insane dictator's howl of rage.

"Neither are temper tantrums," he pointed out smugly, leaning casually against the iron stand occupied by the swirling, distinctly spherical mass of energy that was Overmind.

The stand creaked ominously...

Dread lunged forward to remove the boy...

Overunit Webber rubbed his hands together, cackling with glee...

Jennifer caught her breath...

Benny scratched his head in confusion...

...and the next instant, the boy and the nefarious villain lay, disoriented, amid scraps of metal that had previously been a very flimsy globe stand.

"Ow," Benny whimpered.

"You fool!" Dread shouted, seizing the boy by the shoulder and hauling him to his feet.

Jennifer thanked whatever an eight-year old raised by machines would be likely to thank – the Internet, perhaps? – that no one had the slightest attention to spare her at that moment, nearly shoving her fist in her mouth to stifle insane giggles provoked by the sight of Overmind, the most feared and respected entity known to her vast experience of eight-going-on-nine years, rolling quite unchecked down the corridor, out of Lord Dread's command centre.

"Wonderful," an annoyed drawl drifted back to her. "I don't suppose anyone might think of trying to...perhaps, stop me. No, no, of course not. Just let me keep on rollin', making a bigger and bigger fool of myself with every passing second. I don't get no respect," the voice concluded glumly.

It seemed as though the various doctors, technicians, and so forth were prepared to take Overmind at its word. Certainly, they seemed able to do little else, watching as they were in shock and horror.

"I am getting rather close to an exit," Overmind announced. "If any of you has a few seconds to spare from your busy schedule of gawking, perhaps you could stick out a foot and stop me?"

"Overmind!" Dread howled, charging down the corridor after his large round friend and sending the ever-persistent Overunit Webber flying to one side as he knocked him out of the way.

Overunit Webber promptly lost consciousness, never again to be mentioned for the entire duration of this flashback, which shall be ending soon. The author promises. Scout's honor!

"Hey, hey, hey!" Scout protested. "Leave me out of this!"

"Scout!" the eight-year old blonde girl exclaimed, annoyed. "You're not in this flashback!"

"Right, right, sorry," Scout sighed, disappearing in a puff of logic.

"Oof!" said Benny as he landed hard on the floor. Then, struggling to his feet, he grinned widely at Jennifer. "Call me nuts, but I think we'd better get out of here."

"You know Lord Dread will be angry with you for that," the little girl pointed out, staring anxiously down the corridor.

Dread was nowhere to be seen, as apparently no one had thought to stop Overmind. Later they were to find out that it had bounced across the dusty soil directly outside, and landed squarely in a puddle of muddy water left by a recent rainstorm.

"Aw, he probably doesn't even remember me!"

"If you say so," Jennifer said, tone dripping with foreboding as she followed the rather battered and mussed but still widely grinning Benny from the large, dark, scary room.

As they went, Benny glanced sideways at his little tour guide several times. Finally, he stopped and turned to her.

"Say, this was fun, wasn't it?"

"No, it wasn't," she replied immediately.

Giving no sign that he had heard this, Benny continued.

"I have a feeling that we're going to be really good friends and have lots more neat adventures!"

The little girl gave the pained whimper of one who has lost all hope.

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"And so it began," the no-longer-eight-years-old Jennifer sighed. "A ten-year, completely one-sided friendship with the biggest idiot the world has ever known."

"Now, that's quite a claim," Hawk noted, amused. "There have been a lot of stupid people in history."

"The world didn't know Benny."

"Okay, okay, okay," Scout interjected. "What happened after that? Did you two get in trouble?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure they forgot about me, but Benny got a severe reprimand. Unfortunately, I don't think he understood the point."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because afterwards, he told me that he had 'had a nice talk with Mr. Dread.'"

"Uh…huh. So, is that it now?"

"For that day," she said carelessly.

"You have more Benny-stories?"

"A veritable anthology."

"Alright, then, let's hear another one."

With a vaguely reluctant whimper, she launched into the next tale…

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End Notes: Woot! Massive rewrite! Upon realizing that the rest of the stories in this section are incredibly good, I started to feel a nagging sense of shame at letting this little bit of cheap amusement go unedited. The beginning especially; it began out of nowhere, and proceeded to stay there.

Anyway, I think I like it a lot better with the preamble, and hopefully this will serve as incentive to get back to Benny. :)


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